BC is definitely important, but price was obviously the biggest consideration in my opinion. Nintendo chose to make the GamePad's wireless display tech work as best as possible. That and the fact that they added a ton of features to the GamePad made them make a lot of cost cutting measures to the actual console. Add BC to the mix (which is a requirement), and it got messy pretty fast.

Now we have a console that is evidently harder to port game to than previously thought, with a lot of bottlenecks that need to be dealt with. Nintendo and a handful of other Wii U-only developers will work around these issues and will at some point give us games that look better than most PS3/360 games, but most other devs won't really bother, especially if the sales are not there (and why would they?). That means more shitty ports or at least ports that don't really perform that better than the 360/PS3 version. And a year after PS4/Durango are released, well.. it will only be a little better than what the devs did with the Wii.

So once again, this will probably be another Nintendo machine people should only buy for Nintendo games and a few exclusives here and there, and it will probably suffer from some long barren periods. It's been like that since the N64 anyway, so yeah.